The preparations for the KDE presence at the upcoming LinuxWorld NYC are now complete. It should be a blast! We have ten KDE volunteers staffing the booth, some great demo hardware (generously provided by SUSE), a seven-foot banner, Kolab Server/KDE Groupware demos on a 21" LCD (provided by Ian Reinhart Geiser), and a laptop we will give away to one lucky booth visitor. It is also worth a mention that KDE has been named finalist in two categories of the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards: Best Open Source Project and Best Development Tool (KDevelop).

The North American PR momentum continues to grow!

On the technical side, in addition to the two SUSE machines running KDE 3.2, Ian Reinhart Geiser will have a minicube with Debian unstable and XFree 4.3 and have demos for:

All this in addition to general Q&A on KDE deployment and development in companies.

Sticking with the KJSEmbed theme, on Thursday George Staikos will present a talk on desktop scripting (KJSEmbed, DCOP, and other fun stuff) that is only available to people with conference passes.

In addition to the technical demos, we also have a bit of press relations set up. George will be doing a 15 minute SysCon radio show on "What's New in 3.2" and Brian Proffitt (managing editor at Linux Today) will stop by on Wednesday to get an update on progress on the Conquering the Enterprise Desktop initiative.

A final note of thanks to Nathan Krause at NALeKRA. He approached the KDE e.V. with an offer of thanks for all the great work done on KDE, and as a token of his appreciation he donated a laptop to KDE that we will give away at the booth. Thanks Nathan!

If you are going to the show, be sure to stop by and say hello!

Comments

In the Linux World Product Excellence Awards KDE has a pretty strong presence. In the Front Office Award Ximian is no where to be seen. I have to say, Xandros is an truly excellent distribution, and it should get a heck of a lot more press - as should all KDE distributions.

Everytime a new Xandros release is reviewed everyone gets all gooey about how nice and easy it is to use and that it is based on KDE. Who cares ? What has Xandros done to improve KDE ? And I do not mean "improve" to benefit only themselves. I have yet to see a single stuff Xandros has contributed. Can someone please enlighten me why I as a developer and user of KDE should care about this distro ? At least Lindows tries to sponsor somethings here and there. Where and what has Xandros done ???? Oh well....

Complained a lot about us getting pissed at them for never feeding patches back upstream ;)
Nothing beats two pissy sales chicks coming over to the KDE booth and attacking us in front of the crowd about how we where ungrateful for us not being happy they chose to use (ie brand KDE).

ah well im sure they are happy selling shoes or what ever they do now ;)

We'll be up for Best Of Show too! Hey... nothing wrong with thinking big ;)

"Best of Show" will be awarded to the product deemed by the judges to be an important advancement in the state of the art, and a major step forward for Linux in the market place.

It looks like it's up to KDE and Gentoo for the Best Open Source Project. I just can't see Sun's JXTA or Real's Helix Player (bllleeeccckkkkk) competing with all of KDE. Hell, I can't see much competing with all of KDE ;)

Oh and KDevelop should win hands down over the other tools. Now, if they had put up Quanta then maybe we'd have some competition...

Actually, although I agree that Real's Helix Player has nothing on KDE, I think it's still surprisingly good (I've tested a late December snapshot). Unlike prior Real (and Adobe, and Corel, and...) products for Linux, this one actually seems to work as advertised, with few if any ill effects. So regarding big-name proprietary end-user software companies, it's actually quite a milestone in the Linux world.

And if they used Qt or switched around the button order, I'd even use it! ;)

I would love to see a QT widget as part of the player project. Personally, it would be great to use it on my gentoo/kde box. The project is architected to make it easy to build a QT widget as well. Why not come help us do it? :) I would love to see someone be the QT player maintainer. We have a lot of people dropping by the site, and there shouldn't be many problems with a QT widget development taking off.
Here is the main page (sorry about the links not being linked - the site's not giving me an option for HTML encoding:https://player.helixcommunity.org/
Here is the platforms page:https://player.helixcommunity.org/platforms/
Here is a link to give you a good idea of the Helix Player Architecture:https://player.helixcommunity.org/2003/draft/arch.html
There are a lot of people already using the Helix Player on KDE. I look forward to seeing more KDE/QT folks on our site.
If you have specific suggestions on the button order and to make the player fit in better with the KDE environment, please feel free to email me.
-V

Do you mean binaries for the client? Those will be on cAos (www.caosity.org), and you might just ask the kde-redhat team (http://kde-redhat.sf.net) to make an extra kdenetwork and pim rpm for kolab, as its rather easy..

I'll give you one. And if anyone knows of an alternative, please say so.

Gentoo allows a person to have a stable (say kde3.1.x) and cvs versions accessible and working and selectable from the kdm menus. And the cvs ebuilds make it very easy to keep an up to date cvs snapshot on my machine.

I've been running like that for most of the year. CVS versions changed from stable and nice to flakey and dangerous probably 5 or 6 times last year. My wife and daughter weren't subjected to the instability because they were running 3.1. I reverted to the stable version from time to time because I needed to get some work done. Not complaining, that's to be expected using bleeding edge developer versions.

I agree otherwise with your point. I actually bought a faster machine so I could compile in the background and still have reasonable speed. I need to be using current CVS so I can at least fake it that I know what I am talking about.

"BTW: last time I tried to build KDE at my office desktop, it took 4 (four!) days. I find any distro that demands a 1Ghz box so that it "only" takes a night to install a package... of limited appeal."

How much time would you lose during that night, since you would be sleeping regardless? I run Gentoo on a 300Mhz laptop. I installed it from stage 1 (meaning: EVERYTHING is compiled) with ZERO problems. How did I manage that? Simple: I left it compiling GCC, Glibc etc. when I went to bed. It was finished in the morning. Then I started compiling X, Fluxbox etc. and went to work. When I came back, it had finished. I had a usable system with ZERO time lost. And of course, I can use the laptop while it compiles (you know, Linux IS a multitasking OS). It's not like I have to stare at the screen and watch while it compiles.

Of course, if you need to have the app installed NOW, you can always install a binary instead of compiling from source. I fail to see the problem here

Point of Gentoo is not "yay, we compile everything!". You are extremely superficial if you think that Gentoo is just about compiling. Gentoo-users who use it because "everything is compiled and optimized for my system" are in the minority. Most use it for other reasons (cutting-edge apps, Portage (there's more to Portage than just compiling you know), the community, startup-scripts etc. etc.). The fact that you can compile and optimize the apps is just a nice addition to everything else.

If you think how often you actually install software, compiling time really isn't that big a problem.

I mean, it takes me a couple of days to get a new version of KDE with all of the packages installed, because I can't just leave it running overnight, but then considering that I could download and start compiling KDE the day it is released, and have it churning away in the background while I work, it's probably installed faster than RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian et al come out with their precompiled patched packages.

You're very correct, but minor point of detail I'd like to point out is that you can create a binary package after compiling KDE to Gentoo and then distribute that to your remote machines. Granted, you have to compile it to work on the architecture it will be distributed to, but for someone like me who maintains a large bank of very similiar machines, this feature works very well.

When compiling, Gentoo makes good use of distcc, so if you have 70 machines available I would think a compilation of KDE would be rather quick. :)

* If I use distcc over the computers (which I can´t because they are not in the same place), and build for each one, I gain no time (simple math :-). OTOH, if I use distcc but only once and then install binaries, how is it better than installing a RPM?

After all, one of the alleged advantages of portage is that the build is optimized for each box?

Maybe, but it's not that bad. You you could use the sytem just fine while it compiles. I fail to see why you are in a such a hurry.

You can use distcc and optimize for each box (ever heard of cross-compiling?). But that is NOT the sole reason to use Gentoo. You seem to think that Gentoo is only about "compiling and optimizing" when nothing could be farther from the truth! Yes, optimizations are ONE of the advantages, but it's NOT the biggest advantage!

Walk around? Will you walk all the way over here to Sherman Oaks CA and up to Kalispell MT to show my old friends too? :-) Or how about a link to where I can find out how to install it on my own :-) Thanks in advance.

I don't know whether it is good to have development based in the USA. DMCA, Software patents, export regulations .... So I guess it is better to remain a Europe-centered DE before the US make trouble with their crude law.